Joan Klope jokes these days that her home resembles more of a construction zone than a house.

A long anticipated addition to her house is coming to fruition, complete with windows and skylights that not only shed new light on the home but also to the possibilities for the spacious family room once her children begin starting families of their own.

It is in the den of this Oak Harbor home where Klope has sipped coffee and opened up her own life, sharing with Whidbey Island readers a newspaper column that has incorporated life experiences and her faith.

Her recent decision to step away from the column after 20 years in the pages of the Whidbey News-Times leaves her feeling excited to tackle new opportunities, including a blog, but also a little lost, as if a longtime friend had passed.

After all, she’s been writing “Faithful Living” since 1994.

“Life adjustments are very difficult to make,” Klope said. “I’ve been challenging myself with that.

“I feel like I need to see this as an opportunity to do something a little bit different.”

Klope called her experiences with the column a “20-year endeavor that has added infinitely to my own joy and also my love for Whidbey and island residents.”

She remembers an editor inquiring if she would be interested in resuming a faith-based, weekly column that a local pastor had stopped writing two decades ago.

“I submitted three columns and they ran them all,” she said. “I’ve been writing ever since. It really dropped in my lap. It was a great gift. It caused me to actively process the events in my life so I have a story to tell.”

She said she had two primary goals for the column.

“One, it wouldn’t be a sermon,” Klope said. “And two, I wouldn’t use a lot of religious talk. I wanted to use a lot of resources and a lot of experiences and tell a story of how a person of faith lives on Whidbey and what that was like. I didn’t tell people how to think. I simply said, ‘I am unabashed a mother, a wife, and I’ve had a couple careers here in Oak Harbor and these are my experiences. This is how I process it and how it feels.’ It has just been so much fun.”

Klope said she did some soul-searching and felt it was time to try something new.

A new website is in the works, where she plans to present a faith-based blog incorporating the same philosophy as “Faithful Living.” Yet, under this format, she likes that it will not face the space constraints that newspapers face and that she will be able to choose its frequency of appearances and topic choice.

On the flip side, she is saddened that she might lose some of her longtime readers who prefer a print format to online.

Klope said she doesn’t want to shut the door on a possible return to the newspaper but welcomes the break to focus on some new pursuits and embrace what life might have in store for her and her family.

Her husband, Matt Klope, is planning to retire in the near future after more than 30 years as a federal wildlife biologist for the Navy, then transfer his energies to the family’s taxidermy business on their property.

Joan Klope works as business manager for the taxidermy business, which has operated for 18 years.

The Klopes have been a team for a long time. They’ve been married for 33 years after growing up together in Ventura, Calif. They’ve raised four children since moving to Whidbey Island 25 years ago and building a home in Oak Harbor.

“I think that Matt’s decision to retire feels as epic as when we decided to have children,” Klope said. “It’s really a big change.”

With change comes excitement.

“We’re trying to see how exciting this is to have a new era in our life,” she said.